On-Demand Webinar: Drobo and Retrospect Integration with Q&A

14 August, 2019

Thanks to the hundreds who attended the webinar last week! We had a great time talking about the benefits of using Drobo as your storage device and Retrospect as your backup tool.

Drobo is an incredibly simple storage device that hides a huge amount of complexity: pop in any drive with no tool and grow your Drobo up to 64TB where any drive could fail and no data is lost, even if the power goes out. Other companies offer devices that require tools or a deep knowledge of RAID, but Drobos are so easy that you don’t need to know what RAID is to benefit from its power.

Drobos are available as direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), and iSCSI SANs.

Retrospect is a powerful backup tool for protecting every piece of data, from desktops and laptops to large servers running Windows, Mac, or Linux. Unexpected things happen: accidents, hardware failure, theft, natural disaster or even malware.

When it finally happens, Retrospect makes it easy to restore your data from a backup and move on. You can back up your data or copy it to a local disk, NAS, tape, or the cloud, and Retrospect has out-of-the-box compatibility with Drobo. Visit retrospect.com/drobo to see a step-by-step integration guide for both Windows and Mac.

In case you missed the webinar, we’ve made it available as an on-demand webinar on YouTube.

There was a long list of really good questions during the Q&A, and we didn’t have time to answer all of them during the session. JG Heithcock, GM at Retrospect, and Nick Manocha, Director of Product Management at Drobo, are going to reply to a number of them below.

"Do Drobos require a certain hard drive size or manufacturer?"

Nick: Not at all. Drobo is the only storage device that lets you insert a drive of any size or manufacturer with no tools required and no options to select. It just works.

"Does Retrospect provide replication capabilities?"

JG: Absolutely, and Retrospect’s duplication abilities work for both individual files or entire systems. You can make a copy of your hard drive, or you can have a daily script that replicates a selection of files over to a destination volume, like a Drobo. The same file filtering capability available in Retrospect backup scripts are also available in duplicate scripts. While a backup is stored in Retrospect’s proprietary backup format, optimized for backup and restore, files that are duplicated are available immediately in their own file format, including metadata and ACLS.

"Is Retrospect a subscription or a one-time fee?"

JG: Retrospect is currently available as a one-time purchase of a perpetual license, with Annual Support and Maintenance available as an easy way to stay on the latest release with our Support team available to you. Retrospect will soon be available as a subscription as well.

"When will I be able to run Retrospect on my Drobo?"

Nick: That’s a great question. The Drobo and Retrospect Engineering teams are currently developing a verison of Retrospect that will run on a Drobo as a DroboApp.

"Are Retrospect backups encrypted?"

JG: You can choose your level of encryption with Retrospect: from none up to AES-256. You always control the key. Even if you store your backups on a cloud provider, no one has access to those backups except you if you used AES-256.

"What clouds does Retrospect support?"

JG: We support more than twenty different cloud storage providers now, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Dropbox, Backblaze B3, Wasabi, and many others. You can find all of them at retrospect.com/cloud.

"I already use my Drobo for storing my data. Do I store my backups on it too?"

Nick: You can definitely do that, but we really encourage customers to have a separate device to store backups. There is a golden rule in backup called the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: 3 different copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite location. That means, beyond the primary data device like your laptop or Drobo, you should always have your data on two additional different storage mediums, like another Drobo and the cloud.

JG: And Retrospect makes it really easy to make that happen. You can do a backup of your source data to the designated Drobo and then schedule a transfer script to transfer those backups to a cloud location. The transfer script ensures that your primary device is not required for both operations.